Email Newsletters vs. Blogs

When WebMarketCentral was first launched, the plan was to offer an associated newsletter. After careful consideration, this ain't gonna happen. E-newsletters were, not so many years ago, a clever and unique idea (good newsletters anyway). Just a few short years later, email newsletters are beyond ubiquitous. Even the most laggard of sites offer one. People are sick of them. Email in-boxes are overflowing, few people are signing up, and fewer still are actually opening the newsletters they do receive.

Suzanne Falter-Barns does a great job addressing the issue of blogs vs. e-newsletters here. Blogs are more immediate, faster, easier, less formal, and with comments, more interactive.

In the case of WebMarketCentral, I thought about what my newsletter would include if I wrote one: a link to my latest blog posting, e-commerce news and Web marketing news headlines, a sponsor or two, and some humor. Since pretty much all of that is already available on the site -- generally with RSS feeds as well -- I decided, instead of writing a newsletter every week, I would offer a build-your-own-newsletter capability on the site. It won't have an elegant format, but it will get the job done. And it won't clutter up your in-box.

Oh, and another highly useful marketing site: Mike's Marketing Tools offers an excellent search engine rank checking tool that lets you quickly and easily see how well your site shows up, for any search term you specify, on 10 leading search engines. Very slick.

*****

Terms: newsletter marketing, blogging, Mike's Marketing Tools, search engine position check, search engine rank check, Web marketing news

The Web marketing resource portal: WebMarketCentral.com

Contact Mike Bannan: mike@digitalrdm.com

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Comments

Anonymous said…

Think that will drive you some extra traffic?

6:08 AM

Anonymous said…

I beg to disagree about the important of a newsletter.

The weakness of blogs is that you have to be almost famous to get any good amount of traffic. You've got to be writing constantly to get any search engine traffic.

With direct email, you're in control of staying in touch with people and inviting them back to your site.

I do agree that newsletters may be on the decline. However, it's important to keep ones options open.

10:06 PM

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